Chapter 27
Ilsa
Herra Henrik wore the clothes of a wealthy executive.
I blinked as I looked at him, advancing toward us, because although my new senses told me exactly who I saw, the contrast with the way he looked in the leo’s robe, and even more with the way he looked naked, almost gave me a kind of double vision.
A moment later the whole of my master fell into place, though.
His charcoal jacket sat over his broad shoulders with almost irritating perfection.
His pale shirt lay open at the throat. He moved through the hall with the same calm certainty with which he had moved through the cell, and the fact that he belonged equally in both places—in ritual stone, naked beneath a red robe, and here among polished tables and discreet wealth—struck me hard.
My body reacted before any thoughts properly formed. I felt my spine lengthen. My thighs pressed together a little despite the ache. Heat climbed from my cheeks to my scalp.
He found us almost immediately, his gray eyes taking in the little section for new columbae, the bowls, my posture on the mat, Giovanna with the leash in hand. Something unreadable but very warm flickered in his expression.
Giovanna turned her head toward him with a smile of greeting on her lips.
“She is behaving herself,” she said.
Henrik’s gaze moved to me. “Are you, lille en?”
I lowered my eyes at once.
“Yes, Herra,” I said very softly.
He came closer, and the smells of the refectory seemed to rearrange themselves around the scent of him. He looked down at the bowls on the floor, then at Giovanna.
“In the mead hall,” he said, in that measured voice that could somehow make barbarism sound like policy, “a man does not leave his girl to feed like a forgotten dog. Not when she has served well.” His mouth shifted, almost into a smile.
“We feed a favored creature like this one from the hand. It reminds her who provides.”
Giovanna arched one dark brow. “How touching. The North discovers tenderness.”
“It isn’t merely tenderness,” Henrik said. “It’s also, and more important, ownership.”
My face burned hotter.
He crouched. The expensive fabric of his trousers tightened over his thighs, and I had the distracting, humiliating thought that I knew exactly what those thighs felt like against my body.
He took up the bowl with the torn bread and olives.
His fingers selected a piece of bread first, dipped it into the oil so that it grew golden and flecked with herbs, and he held it to my mouth.
“Open, lille en.”
I opened.
The bread touched my lips. I took it carefully from his fingers, trying not to brush them with my mouth and then feeling heat rush through me because of course I wanted to suckle on those long, strong digits.
I chewed. The bread tasted impossibly good.
Somehow it seemed as if thousands of years of skill had gone into balancing the sea salt with the yeast. The olive oil lit up my mouth.
He fed me an olive next, pressing it just lightly enough to my lower lip that I had to take it from him with unmistakable submission. Then another piece of bread. Then a segment of orange, whose sharp sweetness burst over my tongue and made me almost dizzy.
Around us, I could feel attention gathering. Not the formal scrutiny of the control room, but something looser and perhaps crueler, more dominant: communal curiosity. I kept my eyes lowered and my mouth obedient and took what he gave me.
“That’s enough,” Giovanna said after a little while, though her voice carried the quality of someone observing an experiment with interest. “If you spoil her, Magnusson, we’ll have to start over.”
Henrik set the bowl down. His hand came under my chin and lifted my face just enough that I had to look at him.
“And what do you say,” he asked quietly, “when your Herra feeds you from his hand?”
My throat tightened. I knew the answer before he asked; my body seemed to know everything before my mind caught up, these days.
“Thank you, Herra.”
He looked at me for another moment. The way his eyes crinkled made my heart jump, to my distress. “Good girl.”
My reason recoiled from the glow in my chest, and the fact of that glow brought new heat to my cheeks.
Then, without any warning beyond the tiny shift in atmosphere that seemed to precede so many things with him, my master rose. I heard the nearby table fall quieter. He unfastened his belt with calm, economical movements, then opened his trousers and drew out his cock.
I forgot to breathe for a moment.
The long shaft had become hard already, and I watched it grow even firmer and longer.
The sight of my master with his manhood thick and heavy in his hand, standing in the middle of the elegant refectory in his charcoal jacket and open-necked shirt as if this were the most natural thing in the world, sent a shock through my whole body so acute it made the soreness between my thighs pulse.
Giovanna did not move. I could feel rather than see her stillness beside me.
“Show Bellatrix Hestiaea,” Henrik said, “how a bed thrall thanks her master properly.”
I rose onto my knees more fully without being told. The mat softened the pressure only slightly. My hands came to my thighs automatically, and I looked up at his cock and then at his face.
“Open for your dessert, lille en. Wider than for the bread.”
With a little whine of utter degradation, I obeyed.
He stepped close enough that his erection hovered before my lips, warm and alive and carrying the scent of masculine skin that had already become, to my horror, one of the most exciting things in the world to me.
He tapped the head of it once against my lower lip, not hard, just a reminder, and then he slid forward.
I took him in with a little choking sound that I couldn’t suppress. He gave me no time to acclimate beyond the first brief pressure of his hand at the back of my head. Then he began to fuck my face, holding my mouth firmly in place, his fingers twining in my hair.
The first few thrusts were measured, almost demonstrative.
After that, they deepened. I had thought, briefly, that the setting might make him restrained.
Instead the publicness seemed only to sharpen his intent to enforce his claim.
His hand tightened in my hair, not violently but with absolute certainty of his ownership. His hips worked in a steady rhythm.
I heard someone at a nearby table laugh softly under their breath.
“The Viking has no patience,” said a woman’s voice.
A man answered, amused. “Roman discipline. Norse appetite.”
Another voice, low and male: “It seems they like to make ownership look rustic.”
“And we,” said a woman dryly, “prefer bureaucracy with our degradation.”
I heard the little ripple of laughter that followed, and the sound did something dreadful to me. I was there, on the floor, with my master’s cock thrusting between my lips while clothed people discussed comparative traditions over breakfast.
Herra Henrik’s pace increased. My eyes watered.
I tried to remember what Nymphobus Oceanus, and then my master himself, had taught me.
I breathed through my nose as best I could and let my jaw yield.
My Herra made a low, rough sound above me—not polished at all now, not corporate, nothing but male satisfaction.
“That’s it,” he said. “Take it, girl. Be grateful.”
I moaned around him. The vibration made him tighten his grip in my hair.
“Yes,” he said more harshly. “Good.”
The room around us had narrowed to the line of his trousers against my vision, the expensive cloth, the open fly, the tautness in his abdomen beneath the pale shirt, and the wet, helpless work of my mouth receiving him.
I could hear cutlery. Voices. A chair scraping somewhere.
Giovanna’s heels shifting very slightly on the stone.
Every ordinary sound seemed to underline the indecency.
Then Henrik’s hand tightened at the back of my head in a way I had already learned to recognize.
He drove deeper. I gagged. He held me there for a beat, then another, and his breath left him in a rough burst.
“Swallow for your Herra.”
He came with a low growl that seemed dragged up from somewhere older than language.
Warmth flooded my throat in quick, forceful pulses.
I swallowed because there was no alternative and because he had told me to, and because some dreadful part of me wanted to prove that I could take him properly in any room, under any eyes, according to any custom he named.
He stayed in my mouth a moment longer after he had finished, breathing hard. Then he withdrew.
I bowed my head automatically, swallowing again, my lips wet, my face blazing. He tucked himself back into his trousers with the same matter-of-factness with which he had exposed himself.
“Better,” I heard him say, perhaps to Giovanna, perhaps to the room. “She’s learning. A girl should know how to thank the warrior who feeds her.”
Giovanna made a small sound through her nose that might have been contempt or acknowledgment or both.
“Come,” she said to me. “You will remain on all fours until we reach the Room of Separation.”
She took up the leash and I put my hands out to crawl, unsteady, tasting my master at the back of my mouth. Henrik fell in behind us as we left the refectory. I could feel him there without looking. That proved far worse than if I had been allowed to see him.
Because now I knew he was behind me.
I knew what that meant visually. My belt still framed my waist. The collar still pressed at my throat.
The cuffs still circled my wrists and ankles and thighs.
And beneath those remaining signs, my body was naked where it mattered most. As Giovanna led me down the corridor and around the turn toward the stair that rose to the Ostia office above, I became hideously aware of the movement of my own hips and thighs.
Of the air on my bare sex. Of the fact that from behind Henrik could see everything.